Samira Ibrahim 'Refuses to Apologize' for Her Tweets

Lee Smith reports that Samira Ibrahim, the Egyptian woman whose anti-American and antisemitic tweets have forced the State Department to defer granting her the International Woman of Courage Award -- an award Michelle Obama and John Kerry were scheduled to present to her on Friday -- now seems to admit that she was the author of the tweets in question. She previously claimed that her account was hacked:

...Ibrahim herself has spoken, writing in Arabic on her Twitter page. Egyptian democracy activist Mina Rezkalla provides the translation: "I refuse to apologize to the Zionist lobby in America regarding my previous anti-Zionist statements under pressure from American government therefore they withdrew the award."

Just to refresh your memories, the "anti-Zionist" tweets in question included a celebration of murder: ""An explosion on a bus carrying Israelis in Burgas airport in Bulgaria on the Black Sea. Today is a very sweet day with a lot of very sweet news." In another tweet, she described the leaders of Saudi Arabia as "dirtier than the Jews." (This counts as a twofer, I suppose, because it's hard to imagine America's Saudi allies being very happy about this one.) Then there was this tweet, praising the handiwork of al Qaeda: "Today is the anniversary of 9/11. May every year come with America burning."

Thanks to Samuel Tadros, at the Hudson Institute, and other Egyptian liberal activists, the State Department and the White House have narrowly averted a moral and public relations disaster. If I were John Kerry, I would be ringing up the American embassy in Cairo, asking who exactly vetted the nomination of Samira Ibrahim for this award.

Before joining The Atlantic in 2007, Goldberg was a Middle East correspondent, and the Washington correspondent, for The New Yorker. He was previouslly a correspondent for The New York Times Magazine and New York magazine. He has also written for the Jewish Daily Forward and was a columnist for The Jerusalem Post.

Goldberg's book Prisoners was hailed as one of the best books of 2006 by the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, The Progressive, Washingtonian magazine, and Playboy. He received the 2003 National Magazine Award for Reporting for his coverage of Islamic terrorism and the 2005 Anti-Defamation League Daniel Pearl Prize. He is also the winner of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists prize for best international investigative journalist; the Overseas Press Club award for best human-rights reporting; and the Abraham Cahan Prize in Journalism.

In 2001, Goldberg was appointed the Syrkin Fellow in Letters of the Jerusalem Foundation, and in 2002 he became a public-policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.